The Department of Music will host two talks Friday, Sept. 13, from 4 to 5 p.m. in Harkness Chapel. Members of the university community are invited to attend.
About the talks
1. New Light on the Life and Career of the Trouvère Maroie de Dergnau: Although Maroie de Dergnau de Lille is credited as the author of the chanson d’amour Mout m’abelist in two trouvère chansonniers, almost nothing is known about her life. The descriptors attached to her name, Dergnau and Lille, offer an opportunity to identify this medieval poet-composer, yet little has been learned about her for over 120 years. Alfred Guesnon was the last to establish new biography for Maroie, suggesting in 1902 that she may have been from a suburb of Lille and was possibly related to a Philippe de Dergnau. But Guesnon did not provide details of this man’s identity nor why he thought they could have been related. In the intervening century, scholars have essentially repeated what biographical information he gathered.
This paper offers new evidence about Maroie’s identity, providing the most complete biography to date of a woman trouvère (apart from Blanche de Castille). It situates Maroie within an aristocratic family of Lille by examining contemporary documents from the city, including an obituary that lists her name. It further examines her family members’ activities in Lille and explores the geography of the neighborhood where she likely lived. Finally, it sheds new light on Maroie’s music and musical relationships by analyzing her surviving song and its connections to a chanson d’amour by another trouvère, Andrieu de Contredit. Andrieu’s dedication of Bonne, belle, et avenant to Maroie has long been acknowledged, but it has not heretofore been noticed that his song does more than merely honor her: it responds directly to Maroie’s surviving song by replying to her text and by citing her opening melody in its musical setting of her name.
The findings presented here open lines of inquiry that improve our understanding of women’s involvement in the trouvère community, building on recent work showing that 40% of the professional musicians in thirteenth-century Arras were women (Dolce 2021). The conversation recorded by Maroie’s and Andrieu’s songs may indicate a broader dialogic function of chansons d’amour. Andrieu’s envoy stamps a melody with Maroie’s name, suggesting that other envoys should be reconsidered to locate identifying information.
2. More Than Meets the Ear: Recomposition as Exegesis in Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Imitation Masses:
The Renaissance imitation (or parody) mass has long been subject to technical analysis, but it still remains ripe with potential for intertextual and experiential interpretation. Building on centuries of exegetical musical borrowing practices in the Catholic liturgy, the imitation mass incorporates familiar polyphonic material to add referential specificity to the mass ordinary’s unchanging text. These connections lived not just on the page, but in the brains, bodies, and shared cultural knowledge of the people who sang them.
Tomás Luis de Victoria’s idiosyncratic career and compositional process make his masses, and how they were experienced, worthy of special interpretive consideration. Writing during the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Victoria self-published his works and distributed them to his wide network of Catholic dignitaries and institutions. He repeatedly returned to his own meticulously-crafted motets, reprinting them multiple times and using them as the models for almost all of his imitation masses. Victoria reworked his models in unexpected ways, incorporating their most recognizable material at carefully chosen points in the mass to create intertextual resonances that highlight specific theological elements for his intended audience: singers steeped in the liturgy, familiar with the model, and primed to detect connections between them.
My talk explores how Victoria used his self-borrowed imitation masses to reinforce Catholic doctrine and community during the Counter-Reformation. Building on scholarship that addresses musical borrowing in Renaissance sacred polyphony (Eichner 2018; Elias 2016; Crook 1994) and self-borrowing across Victoria’s works (Rees 2019; Cramer 2001), I employ digital tools from the CRIM Project (Citations: the Renaissance Imitation Mass) and score analysis to investigate Victoria’s eleven self-borrowed imitation masses. After a brief overview of where and how borrowed material is generally deployed, I focus on two mass-model pairs, O quam gloriosum est Regnum (model 1572; mass 1583) and Salve Regina a 8 (model 1576; mass 1592), which hold particular thematic weight. I interpret my findings within the frameworks of cognitive history (Anderson 2015, 2019; Dasgupta 2021) and music cognition (Cox 2016; Margulis 2013), considering the underlying embodied mechanisms of memory that Victoria’s self-borrowing activates to enhance singers’ engagement with liturgy and theology.
About the speakers
Maura Sugg is a PhD Candidate in Musicology at Case Western Reserve University currently working on her dissertation, “More Than Meets the Ear: Embodied Memory, Intertextuality, and Theology in Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Self-Borrowed Imitation Masses.” Originally from Downingtown, PA, she earned her BA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD) and MA in Musicology from Indiana University (Bloomington, IN). From her academic and performance experiences in both programs, she developed a love for Renaissance polyphony that she has carried into her dissertation work. Her focus lies in the interpretive lenses for Renaissance music that inform how listeners perceive and find meaning in it, which has led her to explore intersections of musicology, music cognition, histories of memory, and cultural history. Maura has also spent time with her secondary research interest in popular music and media through her coursework, teaching, and an externship at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. During her time as a graduate student, she has presented at multiple conferences and department colloquium series, held leadership roles in CWRU’s Music Graduate Student Association, participated in early music ensembles, and nourished what she anticipates will be a lifelong passion for teaching.
Suzanna Feldkamp (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate at Case Western Reserve University. She researches trouvère song and its intersections with material culture, women’s history, and social networks.